Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
What is even more amazing than that crazy list of factual evidence showing how SC is thoroughly rotten to the core, is that many people still believe or hope there is a chance it all gets done to some decent level. LikePeople question SQ42's state for two main reasons:
A) They've missed a ton of launch deadlines:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33ue0lzVnys
The most recent deadline that flew by was the aim of closed beta by Q2 2020. They are currently nowhere close to beta status.
B) A lot of features & technology are shared with SC:
There are a few issues here:
- Lots of features simply aren't ready. (Say multicrew NPCs, for example, but there are so many more).
- Lots of tech developed with SC in mind is clearly an impediment to making a single-player game.
- Some core aspects of the game are still decidedly shonky, and not at a launch state, regardless of networking issues. (Everything from the UI being poor up to ships exploding due to a piece of fruit clipping through them, etc).
They should totally be able to do that. The problem is that they're pitching for way more than that. Way way more. And spinning their wheels trying to get there. We're 7 years down the line from those pitches, and there are no NPC engineers who are indistinguishable from humans, with their own likes and wants, managed by you in some form of glorified zoo management game. (No NPCs living 24hr life cycles on board capital ships, no way to staff your ship with your own alts, etc etc)
And so many of the fundamentals are still at the napkin drawing stage. The latest video our shill friend repackaged for you is full of discussions about how they still don't know how Engineering is supposed to work. They just have some animations for NPCs inspecting and replacing components. They don't seem to know how the components will work. They don't seem to know how the player's version of that gameplay will work. It's all still seemingly at the skunkworks stage, in 2022.
And the problem is that the current NPC system is genuinely working beyond capacity. (As seen by the city NPCs, and notably the 'complex' NPCs like the bartender, ceasing to function as the server fills out). The processing load from any attempts to have all this complexity will probably keep any basic pilot NPCs in a degraded state, purely due to overall load. Until they decide all the fancy stuff is silly and rip it all out. Or just solider on with an increasingly dysfunctional system as they add more stuff in. (Or invent the miracle of 'dynamic server meshing', whichever comes first
That's SC's conundrum...
